Professor Tenenbaum, who is also a bioethics professor at Albany Medical College, talked to NPR about how difficult it can be for nursing homes and other facilities to determine consent in cases involving dementia.

"For example, suppose you have a couple and the woman believes that the man she's seeing is her husband," says Tenenbaum during her interview. "Then she consents to a sexual relationship. Is that really consent if she doesn't understand who he is and that she's not married to him?"

​A frequent speaker and writer in the areas of health
law, bioethics and civil rights, Professor Tenenbaum has extensive
experience with health care litigation. During her career, she has been a
section chief and assistant solicitor general in the Attorney General's
Office and was a consultant for the New York State Department of
Health.

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Her high-profile health policy cases cover areas including mandatory testing for AIDS, guidelines for office-based surgery, state sick-leave policies, the constitutionality of closing bathhouses, and reproductive policies at Catholic hospitals. She was the lead attorney in a class action involving the Social Security Administration's over-reliance on the treadmill exercise test and won class-wide relief entitling class members to disability benefits totaling more than $65 million and saving New York's state and local governments approximately $11 million per year.

Professor Tenenbaum has also handled and supervised dozens of civil rights cases. Her high-profile civil rights cases include a landmark decision upholding the constitutionality of applying the State Labor Relations Act to lay teachers at Catholic Schools.